“No, but things were leaning pretty heavily his way. Tarbell had traced Murtagh for me and had found out the one thing that I needed to know; namely, that Murtagh had been ‘placed’ on The Times-Record by Bascom’s recommendation. Murtagh was the man who put the threatening note under my door; the note was printed on a scrap of scratch-paper—copy paper—of the sort that you rarely find outside of a newspaper office. Here I simply put two and two together. Bascom had been conferring with Higginson, or his editor, or both of them, and telling them of my rubbernecking at the wreck. They had agreed among themselves that I’d better be warned off the grass, and they took about the stupidest possible way they could think of to do it.”
“Still, you didn’t have Bascom,” reiterated Starbuck.
“No; but he was the man who had been signing the requisitions for the big purchases of acid, and I was far enough along to chance a jump at him. I knew that if he were the man who was poisoning the locomotives, he wasn’t trusting anybody else; he was doing it himself, often and by littles. I wasn’t at all sure of catching him to-night, of course; but we saw him down here at the fire, and I thought there was an even chance that he might stay and do a little more devilment.”
Maxwell stood up and shook himself into his coat.
“I’m onto you now, Sprague,” he chuckled, in a brave attempt to jolly himself out of the depressive nightmare which had been weighing him down for weeks. “You’re a guesser—a bold, bad four-flusher, with a perfectly miraculous knack of drawing the other card you need when you reach for it. Now, if you could only guess me out some way in which I can straighten up these poor fellows of mine who have been pulled neck and heels off of the water-wagon——”
“Pshaw! that’s a cinch,” said the big man, yawning sleepily again. “We’ll just put our heads together and get out a little circular letter, talking to the boys just as you’d talk to a bunch of them in your office. Tell ’em it’s all off, and the bar is closed and padlocked, and you’ll have ’em all eating out of your hand again, same as they used to. You don’t believe it can be done? You let me write the letter and I’ll show you. All you have to do is to apply the scientific principle; surround the whole subject and look at it calmly and dispassionately, and—ye-ow! Say, I’m going to chance another guess—the last in the box. If you don’t head me over to the hotel and my room, you’ll have to carry me over and put me to bed. And that’s no joke, with a man of my size. Let’s go.”
V
The Cloud-Bursters
IT was an article in the news columns of The Brewster Morning Tribune which first called attention—the attention of the Brewsterites and the inter-mountain world in general—to the plans and purposes of the Mesquite Valley Land and Irrigation Company.
Connabel, a hard-working reporter on The Tribune, had been sent over to Angels, the old head-quarters of the Red Butte Western on the other side of the Timanyonis, to get the story of a shooting affray which had localized itself in Pete Grim’s place, the one remaining Angelic saloon. Finding the bar-room battle of little worth as a news story, and having time to kill between trains, Connabel had strolled off up the gulch beyond the old copper mines and had stumbled upon the construction camp of the Mesquite Company.
Being short of “copy” on the fight story, the reporter had written up the irrigation project, taking the general outlines from a foreman on the job whose tongue he loosened with a handful of Brewster cigars. A big earth dam was in process of construction across the mouth of the rather precipitous valley of Mesquite Creek; and the mesa below, which, to Connabel’s unrural eye, seemed to be a very Sahara of infertile desolation, was to be made to blossom like the rose.